Our granddaughter is furious at the practical uselessness of her otherwise-excellent high school's two resident guidance counsellors.  While posing as authoritative and putatively informative career mentors, she claims, they never listen but seem to do their best to ignore students' own choices. 

She has informed her guidance counsellor on numerous occasions that she plans to study law in university.  She has informed him consistently of her personal choice in universities. He sets this all aside, as though with a concerted effort on his part to guide her away from what has been her years of aspiration, to have her accept the values that inspired him personally. 

And that seems to be summed up in his insistence that small, regional colleges can confer greater opportunities to students than those she has chosen for their reputations as first-rate academic institutions to study law, and that with a degree from one of these rural, regional colleges, she can then return to the small town in which her high school is located, to pursue her career.

This is a path for the future that makes her shudder.  It's her intention to put as much distance as she can possibly manage between herself, her career and that town.  Her aspirations lie elsewhere.  She is not fundamentally attracted to small town life, and that's not surprising, since her earlier life experiences were within the far-flung suburbs of a large city.

Her guidance counsellor rates universities by the accessibility of their websites; the simpler the better; the more sophisticated they are, the more out to sea he is with them, incapable of accessing information required to fully inform the students who are assigned to him.  Our granddaughter spent a good deal of her time on her last appointment with him guiding him through the technical process of accessing data at the universities she is interested in.

She pressed him to assist her in accessing information on scholarships and applications thereto, reasoning that in his professional capacity he would be well endowed with such knowledge to pass on to his students.  But he turned out to be a wealth of disinterest and had no such data to impart to her. 

She is now resigned to the fact that her busy homework schedule must of necessity include the need to do her own sleuthing on these fronts.

Her mid-term grade 11 marks which she worked so hard to achieve and which puts her in the top percentile of her class were to him "acceptable", an oblique statement with little meaning to her, and a true deflator of expectations.